Open Graph Tags and Social Media Sharing

I am trying to troubleshoot an issue for a site that publishes multiple articles a day on a site using Yoast. We are currently using Version 20.8 (free) and automatic updates are enabled.

The site has been live for over 2 years and sharing via social media has always been successful, until the past 2-3 weeks.

Now, the social media channels do not pull the og:image URL in spite of the format being the exact same as it has been. No additional security plugins. No changes to the templates. No changes to hosting. No CDN. The site uses Yoast and ACF as plugins — that’s it.

I’ve checked to ensure the posts are tagged with the correct og title,description,image,author,etc tags. Yoast is populating those correctly, as it always has.

I had heard there were some issues with https:// vs. https:// protocol regarding an og:image, so I have tried to implicitly set and try both — same result.

I’ve used Facebook Debugger and opengraph.xyz to debug with mixed results. OpenGraphXYZ says the site is tagged completely correctly (because it is).

Facebook Debugger will *sometimes* return a 206 partial download response, sometimes it will return a 418 response (which is baffling), and sometimes return a 200 and pull the image as it should.

Twitter’s card validator is unreliable, but I sometimes get a bad http request response error when trying different posts.

One of the 1000 times I scraped with Facebook Debugger I received a

Provided og:image, https://www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/my-image.jpg could not be downloaded. This can happen due to several different reasons such as your server using unsupported content-encoding. The crawler accepts deflate and gzip content encodings.

warning — but it still pulled the image correctly. I could no recreate this with any other post or even the same post multiple times.

So… that would point me more towards hosting/server/network being the culprit, but in an effort to trouble shoot I was hopeful someone in the community could help provide some insight or steer me towards what may be causing this (and the unpredictable results.)

We have implicitly set the “Facebook/Twitter Share Image/URL/Description ” portions of Yoast, and on others implicitly left those blank, on older posts, on newer posts, both ways — same results.

Is there anything in recent updates that could be impacting the open graph tags Yoast places on the site and how the social media sites scrape them?

Are there other debuggers or other methods to test how those issues occur?

Thank you for the help.